भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

Kshatriyas. However, in those adverse days, those displaced Shakyas began to follow other professions for their livelihood. There happened to be a plentiful breed of peacocks in the forest, where these tribes later on lived. To keep these peacocks and sell them became one of their professions. So they had ‘Moriya’ as their nickname, and the Moriya formed a class by themselves. One family of these Moriyas came back to settle in the vicinity of Pataliputra. One woman of that Moriya tribe named Mura (Mayura) somehow got access to the harem of the royal palace and soon became the concubine of the Emperor, Mahapadmanand or ‘Dhananand’, as he was generally called. Her son from this Nanda Emperor was the Emperor Chandragupta. 87. However, when Chandragupta became an emperor, the story of his birth might have appeared derogatory to his greatness and, therefore in some books of the time, the story was slightly altered to mean that Muradevi was the wedded queen of the Nanda emperor, not his concubine, which in consequence meant that Chandragupta was a legitimate royal prince and not an illegitimate one. 88. But a third anecdote seems to outdo both the above stories, saying that Mura and Emperor Nanda were in no way connected. Mura had a son from her husband of the same clan and that son was Chandragupta himself. Later on, with the help and guidance of Arya Chanakya and with his own valour, he raised his poor father and mother to eminence, and after wresting the imperial power from the Nandas, he founded the Maurya Dynasty. 89. It seems a common weakness among all human societies and communities, in a greater or lesser degree, to attempt to judge the greatness or meanness of an individual, not so much from his manifest virtues or vices as from the race, the community or the family he is born in. That is why, as the time passes, such inflated anecdotes about their family tradition are propagated and popularized through plays, poems and novels or through folk-lores. There are other anecdotes too besides the ones referred to above, which seek to ascribe greatness or meanness to Chandragupta. But for the reasons given above, they need not be mentioned here. 90. Was Chandragupta a concubine’s son? Was he not a Kshatriya? What matters though! Chandragupta could have said with justifiable pride, “More than any of you, nominal caste-born Kshatriyas, who bowed your heads to the Mlenchchas, the Greek emperor and his commanders, I, a ‘peerless’ Chandragupta, have a greater claim to being a Kshatriya in as much as with